I'm looking forward to diving into Fallout 4, but this week is simply too crazy for me to consider it. I'll be covering it more and having impressions once I have time to crack open my Pip Boy Edition and journey though a destroyed version of my home state!

Impressions from others have been largely what I expected. It's the quality Bethesda is known to produce. They're known for their worlds and experiences, and also for their mannequin-faced humanoids and questionable performance and UI.

Either way, I'm still excited. Here's some excerpts from reviews around the web that contain notable nuggets for me:

Competency shouldn’t be a bullet point for a game’s store page, but it was jarring to actually enjoy the gunplay in Fallout 4 after trudging through the controls in literally every other game Bethesda has made. Functional used to be the watch-word, and it’s been replaced by something that can actually be fun. Of course, skill shots aren’t always possible, and weapons still have stats that determine their effectiveness, accuracy, recoil and the like — especially now that you can modify literally every piece of gear in the game.

— Arthur Gies, Polygon.com

But the glitchy technical issues appear across the board in every version of the game. In that, Fallout 4 is universal. As such, a big part of deciding if you want to play Fallout 4 becomes a personal inventory of your desire to either revel in these glitches or your patience at dealing with them, should they appear. As someone who has really appreciated this line of games in both its Fallout and Elder Scrolls flavors, Fallout 4 was still harder to swallow than I initially suspected it would be. It’s another one of those games, for better and for worse.

— Jeff Gerüstmann, GiantBomb.com

A fully voiced male or female protagonist is a first for Fallout, but I frankly don’t feel like it added much beyond the convenience of not having to read as much text when playing from the couch. It doesn’t get in the way, either - performances are fine, if somewhat bland - and would only be objectionable to me if I’d envisioned my character’s voice as something outlandishly different. So it’s successfully unobtrusive, at least.